Oh hi there Yabby

How did your last shipment of live sheep go to the Middle East?

You are a dag, Yabby. Your arrogant attempts at logic, corrupted by avarice, lies outside the embrace of ethical environmental sustainability and your childish ad hominens play no part in the light of reasoning.

Nevertheless, your self-interest will not discourage me from providing information from credible sources where all continue to warn that the status quo of growing animals for export in this arid nation is less and less tenable.

And according to the current environmental EPA report, WA loses more than 14,000 hectares of land to salinity each year, the equivalent of 19 football ovals a day.

Therefore, perhaps you may enlighten posters of the hidden "benefits" you constantly allude to and why you believe it's OK to grow sheep for export on Australia's most ecologically threatened land mass, which is also one of the planet's worst environmental hotspots.

Following are a couple of credible sites (global and domestic relevance) for you to peruse which, I'm afraid, entirely contradicts the "expert" fount of knowledge that you boastfully exhort:

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/2007/s1952570.htm

"America’s farmed animals produce 1.3 billion tons of waste per year, or 5 tons for every U.S. citizen. (Just one cow produces 100 pounds per day.) And the pollution strength of it all can reach levels 160 times greater than that of raw municipal sewage.

"The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs.

"The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops. Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

"Manure is laden with phosphorous, nitrates, and heavy metals and emits ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, and cyanide. Manure has always been seen as fertilizer. But in today’s quantities, it is an under-regulated industrial pollutant."

Source: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

Dickie, you had better tell all the people of the earth who raise goats to stop doing it instead of just railing against a poor sheep farmer.

http://www.worldlandtrust.org/news/2005/11/getting-my-goat.htm has the following :-

"Put your head around these statistics. In 1965, at a time when states were becoming independent, there were some 95 million goats in the developing countries of Africa (FAO statistics), and relatively little poverty. By 2004 , with poverty widespread, there were some 225 million goats; that's nearly two and a half times as many. Is there a connection? And if so why are Oxfam, Farm Africa and other charities suggesting increasing the goat population?

In fact the increase is not uniform, and in some countries the goat population has actually declined. But a detailed look shows that those countries that have seen the largest increases in goats are also among those where poverty is rife. Zimbabwe's rose from 700,000 to nearly 3 million, Sudan from 6.8 million to a massive 42 million. And in Mauritania, which is one of the countries least suitable for massive goat populations, the goat population has doubled from 2.7 to 5.6 million. A quick glance at any other statistics shows that desertification increased, human populations increased, and in general it would be safe to say that quality of life decreased for large numbers of people."

I agree with you about population increase though, seems like it applies to us as well as goats.

David

Err Dickie, changing the subject is not going to save you, but
we can address those points too, if you wish.

This was your claim:

*Why is it prudent to continue to dump million of tonnes of animal faeces and urine, on a single voyage, into international waters?*

Bollocks Dickie!

Do you have the foggiest about marine biosystems and how they
function? Pollution occurs when too much is dumped in too small
an area, like human and other waste, along coastlines. Next you
have a dead zone, for obvious reasons. Yet out at sea,
with oceans miles deep, algae and nutrients are critical to
marine life. No food = no fish and algae are a critical part
of the ocean food chain. 40'000 sheep a year would do little
but feed a few sharks.

Extensive livestock production is quite sustainable. Herbivores
have been eating grass and crapping waste for eons. Intensive
anything is a problem. Enough people cramped together and you
have people pollution. Cattle are no different.

Without herbivores keeping the grass down, you would have massive
annual buhfires, started by lightning. Do not compare extensive
and intensive farming, they are quite different.

Salinity is not due to livestock, but due to bad Govt policies.
Govt could fix it by channeling that salt back from where nature
took it, the ocean. Salinity is in fact quite natural.